Why People Get Mad at the Church (One Reason...)

Because the Church is not as our dreams picture her to be, a desperate attempt is undertaken to bring her into conformity with our wishes: to make her a place for every freedom, a space where we can move freed of our limits, an experiment in utopia, which, after all, must exist somewhere.

Called to Communion, 136

Reflection – There is a certain species of anger against the Church, a certain type of bitterness and resentment of the Church, that is really a subtle sort of compliment to Her. I don’t get angry at, say, the Rotary Club for failing to usher in the peaceable kingdom on earth. I don’t harbor a bitter resentment towards the Chamber of Commerce for falling short of the beatitudes and the great commandment of love. I don’t fume and fret because the PTA or the Bowling League have left mankind chained in bonds of ignorance and sin yet.

Human organizations—human expectations! I might be upset if the Chamber of Commerce proved to be a den of thieves and extortionists or the PTA a conspiracy to corrupt our children or the Bowling League a front for a organized crime. But we would never expect such groups to be anything but what they are: a bunch of ordinary people pursuing some mostly harmless or even mildly beneficial end in the normal human muddled up way.

But the Church… that’s another story. It should be better than it is… and so we get angry. It should be a place of love and mercy… and when it is not, we rage. It should be a place of true and genuine freedom… and when it constricts, we rebel.

Now, I’m not talking about the anger that comes against the Church because of clerical sexual abuse scandals and cover-ups. That is a just anger against an intolerable injustice, one which I believe the Church has in recent years taken strong action to address and overcome.

I am talking about the anger, far more common, which comes at the revelation that the Church is, in fact, made up of a bunch of human beings who have the normal human flaws and blindnesses, follies and miseries that all humanity is subject to. When Fr. X is a flake and Fr. Y is a tyrant, and Fr. Z is a drunk and Fr. W doesn’t know how to talk to people… we get mad. When Bishop A is a poor administrator and Bishop B lacks personal warmth, Bishop C is living too lavishly and Bishop D is just a big mean bully… we get mad.

The Church is all human beings living human lives and subject to all the failures and falls that go with it (and, of course, somehow we take for granted and hardly notice Frs. A-V and Bishops E-Z who are fundamentally kind, generous men showing up and doing the best they can each day). Why get mad?

Because somehow we know that the Church is not supposed to be just one more human organization. We know, on some level, that the Church is not just human, but divine, and that the divine charity, the divine goodness, and the divine liberty is meant to flow and shine through all of Her members.

Ratzinger spotlights in this passage, however, the mistaken response many have today to their disappointment in the Church and its very real failures. Namely, to fix the Church by changing it to suit us. The Church has bruised me with its harshness—let me cover every ‘hard teaching’ with soft padding so it cannot reach me anymore. The Church has bound me and restricted me, suffocated my freedom with its overbearing ways—toss out all the rules and let me do what I please!

And when the Church says, as it so often has had to say in recent decades, ‘no, we really cannot teach other than what we teach, as we hold these teachings to be from God and not from man,’… well, that has increased the anger and rage, the contempt and hatred of many.

Meanwhile, the very faults and frailties of the Church’s ministers, the constant falling short of all of us to live the Gospel in fullness and proclaim it in all its perfect beauty and goodness actually calls us into a deeper freedom and deeper goodness and charity. Namely, to know that the Church is the instrument of salvation, but not the Savior. The Church is the sign of salvation, but not Salvation Itself. The Church is the seed of the kingdom, but the kingdom is coming, not here, growing, not yet mature.

And so the Church’s failures, which are real and painful, impel us not towards bitterness and anger or a reforming spirit based on our own ideas and preferences, but towards Christ. To cry out to Him, to deepen our communion with Him, to see Him coming towards us through the wreckage and mire, through the desolate city the Church often resembles, and to put all our confidence in Him, to find our true freedom, not in casting aside the laws and rules, but in the communion of love He makes possible for us, a communion of love that can even extend to Frs W-Z and Bishops A-E…

More! More! More!

Modern scientific thought has increasingly shut us up in the prison of positivism, thus condemning us to pragmatism. Much can be achieved by doing so; it is possible to journey to the moon and still farther into the immensity of the universe. Yet in spite of this, man always remains in the same place, because he does not surpass the real limit, which is set by what can be quantified and produced. Albert Camus has portrayed the absurdity of this freedom in the character of the emperor Caligula: everything is at his disposal, and everything is too little for him. In his insane craving for more, for something bigger, he cries: ‘I want the moon, give me the moon!’

By now it is more or less possible to have the moon, but when the real boundary—the boundary between earth and heaven, between God and the world—does not open, even the moon is merely an additional piece of earth, and by reaching it man is not brought one step closer to the freedom and plenitude he longs for.

Called to Communion

Reflection – Condemned to pragmatism! What a fate! When the only question that matters is ‘can we do this?’ then this pragmatic trap is upon us. We are hungry creatures; it is indeed the very nature of human beings to always reach out for more, more, more… something.

We want more. And so we have crazy Caligula baying for the moon. In our day we have crazy trans-humanists baying for genetically modified human beings, a new super-race that will improve on what God has made. We constantly reach out for more, more, more. The moon is mere pocket change at this point.

It is a trap. What we long for is not greater technical capability, greater mastery of the universe and its secrets, greater ability to manipulate reality. We do not really want freedom from all moral constraints and a total carte blanche to fashion our lives as we please. Our longing, our hunger, is channeled into those directions, but it is not satisfied in those directions.

The longing is for self-transcendence, for breaking out of the merely human level. We truly are made for something greater than what our capacities can achieve. Technical competence, even if it takes us to the stars, leaves us at the level of our humanity. Moral lawlessness reduces us considerably below the level of our humanity. It is breaking through to that which is above our humanity, and which loves us in our humanity, that is the desire of our heart.

This, or rather He, is what cannot be quantified or produced. Only received, only contemplated, only loved. And in that contemplation and love, true freedom and plenitude are given to us.

We all have to grapple with these questions at some point or other. We can continue to be earth-bound, simply trapped in one form of pragmatism or other, living life bound by our own plans. But we have to know that the earth and all that is in it is passing away. The desire of our heart for true transcendence must take us beyond what our earthly limits and ambits set for us.

It is Lent, and a good time to ponder afresh these things. What are we made for? How are we going to get there? What is holding us back? And where is God in all this? Good Lenten questions. To escape the trap of pragmatism and break through to what God wants to do in our lives would be a good Lenten intention for all of us.

Emerging From the Cave

Yet this bitterness against the Church has another more specific cause… a secret hope still looks to the Church, which, it is felt, ought to be a kind of island of the good life, a tiny oasis of freedom… it is in the church that the dream of a better world should be realized. There, at least, one would hope to know the taste of freedom, of redeemed existence—to emerge from the cave, as Gregory the Great expresses it in language borrowed from Plato.

Called to Communion, 134-5

Reflection – The bitterness to the Church Ratzinger describes here is that of the ‘how dare the Church tell me what to do! type’ The resentment of the Church as the pre-eminent voice proclaiming the moral law in its fullness to a world that largely would prefer to do without it.

It is interesting that he sees in this bitterness a subtle compliment being paid to the Church. Now, surely there are people who simply disagree with the Church, and dismiss its claims without much fuss. There are some people who are simply indifferent towards the Church, who think little of it.

But the people—and there are many of them—who have this kind of bitterness, this kind of outrage against the Church—well, that’s telling, isn’t it? Why be outraged? I’m not outraged at Hollywood for pushing its version of morality, even though I disagree with it entirely. I don’t expect Hollywood to do anything except… well, what they do (and this is a G-rated blog, so I won’t go into that any further).

The people who get really angry at the Church for teaching that abortion, contraception, homosexuality, IVF, pre-marital sex, euthanasia, torture, pre-emptive war, exploitation and neglect of the poor are morally wrong, who become bitter towards the Church on account of these things, actually are bearing witness in a sort of upside-down way to the Church’s own claims about itself.

The Church should be offering the good life to people. The Church should be offering freedom and peace, redemption and hope to people. So the moral law in all its unyielding strictures is seen by many as a betrayal of what they secretly hold the Church to be. After all, ‘my good life’ requires that I do (insert practice here).

Of course, some would say that this means the Church needs to loosen up. Pastoral sensitivity and concern for the Church’s mission mean that we need to change our rules, let people do what they want, stop making everyone feel guilty. Only then will people experience the Church as what it is, namely a place of freedom and joy.

We cannot do that. For one thing, we sincerely and deeply believe ‘the rules’ are God’s, not ours. We can’t change them even if we wanted to. And we don’t want to. Because they are God’s rules, and we believe that God alone knows the true path to freedom. The human notion of freedom as freedom from all restriction is self-defeating. Sooner or later some unrestricted human will use his freedom to destroy mine, or I will use my freedom in a self-destructive way.

Freedom is walking the path of life, of truth, and of love. The Church is the place of freedom, because the Church is the place of truth. This emergence from the cave signifies the movement from appearance and illusion into the clear daylight of reality. This is what the Church offers.

We are free to walk out of the cave into the light. We are not free to walk into the light and still stay in the dark. And the Church, in its teaching office, continues to shine the light it possesses—light as we understand it—into the darkness of the world. Let those who accept this light do so, those who reject the light look elsewhere. But those who are bitter and resentful of the Church for shedding the light it does on things, clearly are looking to the Church still. I guess that’s hopeful, in a funny sort of way.

One Simple Sentence

The maker is the opposite of the wonderer. He narrows the scope of reason and thus loses sight of the mystery. The more men themselves decide and do in the Church, the more cramped it becomes for us all. What is great and liberating about the Church is not something self-made but the gift that is given to us all. This gift is not the product of our own will and invention but precedes us and comes to meet us as the incomprehensible reality that is ‘greater than our heart’. The reform that is needed at all times does not consist in constantly remodeling ‘our’ Church according to our taste, or in inventing her ourselves, but in ceaselessly clearing away our subsidiary constructions to let in the pure light that comes from above and that is also the dawning of pure freedom.

Called to Communion, 140

Reflection – There are probably few subjects Ratzinger has given more attention to than the ongoing reform of the Church. As a young theologian, he was among the periti of the Second Vatican Council; as a bishop, archbishop, Cardinal Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, and as the bishop of Rome, he has labored unceasingly for the proper understanding and implementation of the reforms of the Council, and endured with considerable grace and charity the opprobrium and slanders of those with a different understanding of what this would mean.

We see in the above passage the central attitude he assumes towards this whole reform business. The Church is not something we make, not our creation, not our work fundamentally. It is a gift coming to us from above. The fundamental structure of the Church, its essential being and purpose and action, is given to us, is the work of God, the action of the Holy Spirit coming to us from above that gives light and freedom to our eyes.

This is so crucial. It’s not just matters we may think of as relevant to Church reform: can women be ordained priests? What about celibacy? How should the liturgy be celebrated? What about structures of authority? What is the proper role of the theologian? What about dissent? What is the mission of the laity? What about sex???????

All that stuff has its importance and place. But there is a fundamental attitude towards all reality that I believe must come before any of these matters, and indeed any matter at all can be properly understood and lived.

It’s this whole business of reality coming to us ‘from above’, of truth coming to us as a gift from God, of life being something to be wondered at before it is to be made. Wonder, awe, gratitude, contemplation—without these, we are in a sorry state of affairs. God unfolds around us moment by moment, day by day, his awesome and mighty works. The beauty of the world he made, the strange actions of love and mercy that attend all of our lives (although we miss so much by our inattentiveness), the most mysterious dispensations of his will unfolding around us moment by moment in his providential disposal of the world—all of this is to be wondered at, received, contemplated. And then, surrendered to.

It’s this whole business of Mary, you know. And the angel, and this unfathomably mysterious event in Nazareth 2000 years ago or so. “Let it be done to me according to your word.” A whole way of life, a whole approach to reality, an entire anthropology, sociology, economics, politics, ecclesiology, psychology, younameitology emerges from this one simple sentence.

It is to be our sentence, if we are to be Christians. If we want to be something else, we can say some other sentence, but this is the sentence of the Christian. “I am the handmaid of the Lord, let it be done to me according to your word,” and then this mysterious gift, this mysterious action, this mysterious Word enters our flesh. What is this? We cannot encompass it or comprehend.

We can fall down and worship, though. And this is Christmas. This is faith. This is life. Without this, we will never know how to ‘be Church’, or ‘be human’ or be much of anything worth being.

Mary, teach us.

Letting The Chips Fall

Reform is ever-renewed ablatio—removal, whose purpose is to allow the nobilis forma, the countenance of the bride, and with it the Bridegroom himself, the living Lord, to appear… this path alone allows the divine to penetrate and brings about congregatio, which as both gathering and purification is that pure communion we all long for, where ‘I’ is no longer pitted against ‘I’ and self against self. Rather, the self-giving and self-abandonment that characterize love becomes the reciprocal reception of all that is pure and good. Thus, the word of the kindly father who reminds the jealous older son what the content of all freedom and the realization of utopia consist of becomes true for every man: ‘all that is mine is yours’ (Lk 15:31).’

Called to Communion, 142-3

Reflection – Well, this is a mouthful! The Holy Father is talking in this book about the reform of the Church, the whole project that has taken up so much of the energies of Catholics, especially clergy and religious, in the past 50 years or so.

His reference to ablatio is a bit obscure (the surrounding context of the quote explains it). He is using here the image of the sculptor who ‘sees’ the statue in the block of marble and merely chips away everything that is not part of it.
This is crucial, though, both in the reform of the Church and in our own personal Reformations, big and small. The point is that the Church already exists, not as our creation or as any kind of product of human ingenuity, but as a creature of God, indeed the most noble creature there is, for it shares in a wholly supernatural way in the life of Christ who is God.
So our efforts to ‘reform’ the Church, which are perfectly legitimate and necessary (ecclesia semper reformanda-the Church always in need of reform) have to proceed from that understanding. What has God made? Who is this Bride, this Body? What has been established from the beginning, what have we understood over the millennia as being proper to the life of the Church? Only from that can we ‘chip away’ at things that should not or do not need to be there.
So the reformer who talks about eliminating Confession or changing the nature of the priesthood by allowing women’s ordination or jettisoning the indissolubility of marriage or… well, we all know the drill. Throw everything out that offends modern sensibilities. But this proceeds from the idea that we are the ones determining what the Church is. There is no ‘Church’ that is given from the hands of God – only our making and fashioning.
There is a deep principle at stake here, even deeper in some ways than the specific controversies which get most of the media play, important as they are. Is God the author of reality? What is human creativity? Who am I? Who are you? Do we create ourselves? Or are we co-creators with God? What is my path of self-reformation? Making myself up out of thin air, or beholding within myself the image of God already there, and ‘chipping away’ at what doesn’t belong to that? Very deep questions.
And it is fascinating (this quotation from Ratzinger is rich, rich, rich!) that he links it to communion. Of course he’s talking about the Church, and that is the whole substance of the Church’s life, but again the deep point he makes is that communion between people comes from living in truth. When the truth of my being and your being emerges from all the falsehood we have to ‘chip away,’ then we can live both in that open receptivity towards God (the image of the Bride), ‘all that I have is yours,’ and from that a happy receptivity towards one another.
I could go on and on about this, but this post is long enough. It’s worth meditating on, though. What is my ablatio today? What chips of marble are keeping me from you, from God, from happy communion? And what tool will remove those chips? (Hint, it starts with ‘Cr’ and rhymes with ‘boss’!)

Outrage!

The thirst for freedom is the form in which the yearning for redemption and the feeling of unredemption and alienation make their voices heard today. The call for freedom demands an existence uncramped by prior givens that keep me from fully realizing myself and throw up external obstacles to my chosen path…  The limits that the Church erects seem doubly burdensome because they reach into man’s most personal and most intimate depths. For the church’s rules for ordering life are far more than a set of regulations to keep the shoulder-to-shoulder traffic of humanity as far as possible from collision. They inwardly affect my course in life, telling me how I am supposed to understand and shaped my freedom. They demand of me decisions that cannot be made without painful renunciation. Is this not intended to deny us the sweetest fruits in the garden of life? Is not the way into the wide open closed by the restrictive confines of so many commandments and prohibitions? Is not thought kept from reaching its full stature just as much as the will is? must not liberation consist in breaking out of such immature dependency? And would not the only real reform be to rid ourselves of the whole business?

Called to Communion

Reflection – Ratzinger shows in this passage how well he understands the modern world. He had been a university professor in 1968, when student riots swept across Europe. The soixant-huitards and their anomic anti-authoritarianism would define the next half-century in European intellectual and cultural life.

Ecclesia delenda est – the Church must be destroyed – this is the spirit of the age. It tells us what to do, and this is intolerable. For anyone to tell me what to do is intolerable. Ecrasez l’infame! Voltaire’s cry rings out louder than ever today. It is an interesting phenomenon, though.

For example, the environmental movement tells us what to do every day of the week, and indoctrinates children to spy on and hector their parents. The government never tires of telling us what to do: what to eat, how to exercise, what we can and cannot do on our own private property (to use a quaint old-fashioned term!). The secular gurus – Oprah and all that – never ever cease for a day doling out instructions on how to live, shop, love, budget, what to read, what to think, etc. etc. etc.

And yet, when the Church, which has no police force, little indoctrination of children these days (alas), and nothing remotely approaching Oprah or Dr. Phil’s Neilson ratings, tells people what to do, there is outrage. Or, rather, OUTRAGE!!!!!!!!!

Hmmm. One might be tempted to suspect that the Church’s advice on the meaning and mores of life, unlike all of the above parallel magisteria of secularity, actually hits something in us, something deep and true, some innate knowledge of God and the truth of human life that we cannot quite suppress. So when Holy Mother Church tells us not to fornicate, or contracept, or abort (I mention these, not because they are the only or even most important teachings, but because they are the ones that cause the most OUTRAGE), it is intolerable.

We’re trying to forget; don’t remind us. We’re working on our denial; stop bothering us. We’re hardening our hearts against truth in favor of self-will; don’t touch those places in us that still know, a little bit, the truth of life.

I can’t think of any other reason why the Church’s teachings provoke such anger and rage when the far more intrusive and omni-present teachings of everyone else provoke none. Can you?

To Stand in the Horizon of the Eternal

The fundamental liberation that the Church can give us is to permit us to stand in the horizon of the eternal and to break out of the limits of our knowledge and capabilities. In every age, therefore, faith itself in its full magnitude and breadth is the essential reform that we need; it is in the light of faith that we must test the value of self-constructed organizations in the Church.

Called to Communion, p. 145

Reflection – OK, so this passage is a bit of a mouthful. Ratzinger has been talking in this book about the Church, its nature, its challenges, its mission. In an earlier post, I discussed how people resent the Church for telling them what to do—how the Church seems to be an enemy of human freedom.

Here, Ratzinger answers that charge, pointing out that the true limitation of our humanity is our being bound by our own limits and capacities and temporality. We are all born into our own time, land, culture. We all have a certain degree of intelligence, strength, personal charisma and drive. We all find ourselves (especially as life goes on and we get a wee bit older!) hampered by our limitations, our finiteness.

The Church, because it bears the life of Christ, the grace of God, the dynamism of the Spirit into the world, frees us from the strict limitations of our finite humanity. We can be weak in body, plagued by illness or disability, but united to Christ this very weakness becomes grace upon grace poured out in redemptive suffering. Or we can be weak in mind, incapable of understanding much, but in Christ the treasures of wisdom and understanding are offered to us. An illiterate peasant who takes hold of the Gospel possesses infinitely more wisdom than an atheistic university professor.

And it is indeed the Church that makes this liberating power of Christ present in a visible incarnate way in the world, through the sacraments, the teaching office, the visible structures. And this is why Ratzinger points out that efforts to reform the Church, to change those structures, must be carried out in light of the Church’s true liberating mission—it’s not a question of loosening up the moral rules or letting anyone do whatever they want. It’s a question of bringing people the fullness of the Gospel so that we can put our selfish selves to death and be raised up with Christ. This is true freedom; anything else is a useless parody.

Ecclesia Delenda Est!

The thirst for freedom is the form in which the yearning for redemption and the feeling of unredemption and alienation make their voices heard today. The call for freedom demands an existence uncramped by prior givens that keep me from fully realizing myself and throw up external obstacles to my chosen path…  The limits that the Church erects seem doubly burdensome because they reach into man’s most personal and most intimate depths. For the church’s rules for ordering life are far more than a set of regulations to keep the shoulder-to-shoulder traffic of humanity as far as possible from collision. They inwardly affect my course in life, telling me how I am supposed to understand and shape my freedom. They demand of me decisions that cannot be made without painful renunciation. Is this not intended to deny us the sweetest fruits in the garden of life? Is not the way into the wide open closed by the restrictive confines of so many commandments and prohibitions? Is not thought kept from reaching its full stature just as much as the will is? must not liberation consist in breaking out of such immature dependency? And would not the only real reform be to rid ourselves of the whole business?

Called to Communion

Reflection – Ratzinger shows in this passage how well he understands the modern world. He had, after all, been a university professor in 1968, when student riots swept across Europe. The soixant-huitards and their anomic anti-authoritarianism would define the next half-century in European intellectual and cultural life.

Ecclesia delenda est – the Church must be destroyed – this is the spirit of the age. It tells us what to do, and this is intolerable. For anyone to tell me what to do is intolerable. Ecrasez l’infame! Voltaire’s cry rings out louder than ever today. How dare—how dare!—the Church tell me what to do.

It is an interesting phenomenon, though. The indignation at the Church’s moral teachings does not seem to extend to other groups and individuals who have their own ideas of what we should do.

For example, the environmental movement tells us what to do every day of the week, and even indoctrinates schoolchildren to spy on and hector their parents. The government never tires of telling us what to do: what to eat, how to exercise, what we can and cannot do on our own private property (to use a quaint old-fashioned term!). The secular gurus – Oprah and all that – never ever cease for a day doling out instructions on how to live, shop, love, budget, what to read, what to think, etc. etc. etc.

And yet, when the Church, which has no police force, little indoctrination of children these days (alas), and nothing remotely approaching Oprah or Dr. Phil’s Neilson ratings, tells people what to do, there is outrage. Or, rather, OUTRAGE!!!!!!!!!

Hmmm. One might be tempted to suspect that the Church’s advice on the meaning and mores of life, unlike all of the above parallel magisteria of secularity, actually hits something in us, something deep and true, some innate knowledge of God and the truth of human life that we cannot quite suppress. So when Holy Mother Church tells us not to fornicate, or contracept, or abort (I mention these, not because they are the only or even most important teachings, but because they are the ones that cause the most OUTRAGE), it is intolerable.

We’re trying to forget; don’t remind us. We’re working on our denial; stop bothering us. We’re hardening our hearts against truth in favor of self-will; don’t touch those places in us that still know, a little bit, the truth of life.

I can’t think of any other reason why the Church’s teachings provoke such anger and rage when the far more intrusive and omni-present teachings of everyone else provoke none. Can you?

Breaking the Stronghold of the Self

Speaking of Church as Body of Christ, Ratzinger writes:

The Semitic concept of the ‘corporate personality’ stands in the background; this concept is expressed, for example, in the idea that we are all Adam, a single man writ large. In the modern era, with the apotheosis of the subject, this notion became entirely incomprehensible. The ‘I’ was now a fortified stronghold with impassable walls. Descartes’ attempt to derive the whole of philosophy from the cogito – because only the ‘I’ still appeared accessible in any way – is typical in this regard. Today the concept of subject is gradually unraveling; it is becoming evident that the ‘I’ locked securely in itself does not exist…”

Called to Communion: Understanding the Church Today, p. 35

Reflection – Ah yes – individualism! The air we breathe, the ocean in which we swim, the first principle of life, at least in the formerly Christian West. In Madonna House, where we live what most people consider a fairly intense communal life, we’ve had a large number of Korean guests over the last ten years or so. They have enriched our lives in many ways--regular infusions of kimchi among them!

More seriously, we’ve had many opportunities to reflect on the differences between the individualistic culture of North America and the communal cultures more typical of Asia. What for us is an intensely, almost intrusively communal life for most of them barely registers as communal life at all. It has been good for us to learn and reflect that modern individualism (which we cannot help carrying within us, children of our culture that we are) is far from being the only way of being human in the world.

Individualism in fact poses a serious problem for the proclamation of Christ to the world. Ratzinger in this passage expresses it well: when the ‘I’ is everything, a fortified stronghold, the measure of all reality, the beginning and end of personal identity, then the call to find one’s deepest truth, one’s most essential reality in the Word and Love of Another is either an outrage or a complete cipher. How is it even possible to receive one’s life from another? I am I and Jesus is Jesus – both of us locked in our subjective realities. Isn’t it some kind of sick co-dependence for me to look to Him for everything? Shouldn’t I grow up?

The path out of this impasse with Christianity is the path out of individualism. We are in fact made for others; we are in fact made to experience our human dignity and freedom in our life with and for others. We are in fact constituted as a self, a person, a subject who can choose to love or not love, serve or not serve, by being first known, loved, and served as an object by the One who made us.

That this One who made us is so intensely relational, yet One, within His Triune Self,  implies that He has made us to be this one body, this one collective group, in Him. Yet it is not the collective we have rightly come to dread of the soviet, the communist collectivist Hell where the individual is crushed in the name of the spurious whole. The collective of the Body of Christ, because it comes from the Heart of Love, dwells in this Heart, and is oriented always and everywhere towards this Heart, this love, crushes no one. In fact, it is the pathway to true life and joy, which we cannot experience as isolated individuals. We are made to be part of a family, a group, a society; only in God can this society be one in which our true and deepest selves flourish and grow to their full measure.